I assume that’s a joke since the Biden comments are less than a year old.
Well, yeah. I’m sure the Obama camp had that all worked out in anticipation of what McCain would do. These guys are no dummies.
True, except I don’t think he’ll pick Romney. McCain really dislikes him. I think this makes Ridge the likely candidate. I governor instead of a Senator, and someone who might help in PA.
Welp, my dad’s been anti-Obama. This just changed his mind. (Republican of the pissed off at Bush sort. Voted for Kerry last election, voted for Bush the election before.)
Oh I don’t think he’ll run for President at 73, that’s not what I meant. I meant he’d still stay on as VP for the full 8 years…not step down after one term. Taht’s all.
John Mace - I think Tom Ridge is the most likely pick as well, and if he does pick Ridge, this is really going to be a race…because I would think Ridge is well liked.
So Biden is feisty? Not the best adjective…
They don’t need to. Biden helps in the one southern state that is maybe relevant, Florida (he has high approval ratings from seniors). Regardless, Obama’s path to victory doesn’t include the South, and it hasn’t for several months. It’s:
Kerry states + Iowa + Mountain West or Kerry states + Iowa + Ohio.
How was Obama ever going to win the South? Clinton or Richardson weren’t going to help him much. Obama’s best shot at the south is to try to energize new voters, while speaking to the older ones, as he’s been doing in all the working class areas. He’s got no hope with the people who think the Confederacy should have won, obviously, and no VEEP choice would have helped.
You (and John) don’t think Ridge’s views on abortion will be a problem for a Republican base that is already wary about McCain?
Yes, I’m hoping McCain will stick with his base for his VEEP choice.
They’re not, but they don’t need to. There are plenty of states that can turn the tide without winning the South–Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, etc. Virginia is a likely Southern pickup this time, and I still think North Carolina is a possibility, but he’ll never “win the south”.
Obama’s going to lose by at least fifteen points here in Kentucky, and he’d have to put the reanimated corpse of Adolph Rupp on the ticket to do anything about that.
Biden’s son is an Army officer who is set to be deployed to Iraq. He’s a JAG in the reserves. This will play well.
I was actually pushing for having a young VP who could run as the incumbent in 2016, but if you go back and review the last 50 years, being the standing veep at the end of an administration’s term limit doesn’t guarantee much of anything, so I guess I don’t have as much of a point as I thought I did.
I’d say it comes pretty close to guaranteeing you the parties nomination, but yea, VP’s haven’t faired well in actually getting elected.
That may have more to do with our countries tendency to not let any one party hold the WH for too long rather then any intrinsic problem with moving from VP to prez though.
The Liberal I knew a few years ago wouldn’t have taken a cheap shot like that, and if anyone else had, would have been the first to point out that Republicans tend to be better educated than Democrats.
Maybe they did once, but ISTM that over the past 20 years or so, the Republicans have made a point of recruiting their rank and file from the least educated, most credulous, least informed sement of the population. I can’t see any other way that GWB could have been elected.
I think you have to look at all the pluses and minuses and not focus on just one issue. Every possible pick has some negatives-- I just think Ridge is a strong contender overall.
I agree about the cheapness of that shot, but are Republicans actually more educated than Democrats? I thought college educated people tended more towards the Democrats than the Republicans.
The Republicans won the last two presidential elections doing exactly the opposite of that.
Here’s the '04 election results. Kerry and Bush split the college grad vote, but Kerry led amongst those with post-graduate degrees while Bush led amongst the rest. So I imagine you could parse that to support either “Dems are more educated” or “There are more educated Republicans” depending on who you want to make look good.
I know we all thought Cheney would only stay one term as well. Actually, I think he would have retired if “9/11 changed everything” wouldn’t have happened. So, I do see Biden as a very possible one term Veep.
Obama needs to win the Kerry states plus Ohio. That seems doable. Ohio has gotten bluer since 2004 and there is no same sex marriage issue this year.
I wonder if it will mean anything at all to Hillary supporters that Joe Biden drafted and spearheaded the Violence Against Women Act. Taking that into account would require an application of rationality on the Hillaristas’ part, of course, but it’s a significant piece of women’s rights legislation and the Joebama Campaign should at least make it well known.
Nope. The Democrats are still the blue-collar party. From this Chart at Wikipedia you can see that the trend has been pretty constant since 1966. In 2004, 35% of Republicans had a college degree or higher, while only 21% of Democrats did. Here’s the chart for women, which shows the same trend.
There’s another chart I couldn’t find this morning, from the Pew Political Attitudes project, which showed that as their educational level went up, the chance of a person being a Republican increased. The exception was the group of people with PhD’s, which contained more Democrats - I’m guessing because Republicans probably are over-represented in areas like MBA’s and Engineering, which tend to take you to the Master’s level, while Democrats tend to be over-represented in academia and education, which tend to take you to the Ph.D level.
But in the end, the average educational level attained by Republicans was significantly higher than it was for Democrats.
